What’s on TV Thursday: ‘The Cold Blue’ and D-Day Stories

What’s on TV

THE COLD BLUEeight p.m. on HBO. World War II was nonetheless raging when “The Memphis Belle,” William Wyler’s documentary in regards to the crew of an American bomber, was launched in 1944. That government-produced movie made for a “thorough and vivid comprehension of what a daylight bombing is actually like for the young men who wing our heavy bombers from English bases into the heart of Germany,” Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times that yr. To shoot it, cinematographers (together with Wyler) flew on bombing missions; certainly one of them, a primary lieutenant named Harold J. Tannenbaum, was killed within the course of. Restored footage shot for “The Memphis Belle” has been organized by the director Erik Nelson for “The Cold Blue,” a brand new documentary, which makes use of Wyler’s materials to offer an intimate sense of what life was like in a World War II bomber. “It was more or less like being in death row in a penitentiary waiting on your turn,” one veteran says in a voice-over. “And you knew it was coming.”

THE LONGEST DAY (1962) 8 p.m. on TCM. Henry Fonda, John Wayne and Sean Connery are among the ensemble cast of this classic D-Day movie. (Also featured: Gert Fröbe, who would square off against Connery two years later as the villain in “Goldfinger.” He plays a German officer here.) The movie reconstructed the Normandy landings with an enormous budget and striking black and white imagery; it clocks in at around three hours. After its opening in Manhattan, Bosley Crowther wrote in The Times that “it is hard to think of a picture, aimed and constructed as this one was, doing any more or any better or leaving one feeling any more exposed to the horror of war than this one does.”